


blood

by escapismandsharpobjects



Category: Young Wallander (TV)
Genre: FebuWhump2021, Field Surgery, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt/Comfort, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 09:55:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29524662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escapismandsharpobjects/pseuds/escapismandsharpobjects
Summary: febuwhump day 17: field surgery.“You’re bleeding,” she says, and he doesn’t even bother to look.“I fell,” he says. He’d be more shocked if hewasn’tbleeding somewhere, honestly.“No, Kurt. You’rebleeding.”
Relationships: Kurt Wallander & Frida Rask
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	blood

**Author's Note:**

> hi! here's yet another unplanned young wallander fic by yours truly. i wasn't feeling my plan for today so i decided to do kurt instead and all of a sudden the story was just there. great feeling. anyhow this was actually super fun to write and i really enjoyed it! hope you like it :)

He and Rask are at the home of a suspect, on the edge of the woods. It’s nothing but trees for miles around, and Kurt can’t help feeling like this place is creepy as he knocks on the door.

Or, if not creepy, then apparently dangerous. A door slams from the rear of the house, and Kurt and Rask rush to the source of the noise of their suspect getting away, jumping over a small fence just in time to see the suspect fleeing into the woods, aiming back at them with a gun. 

Both of their hands reach for their weapons, but not before the suspect gets a shot out. It’s desperate and wild, and the two police take no time in continuing their pursuit. 

There’s a split second in there where Kurt feels like something’s hit him and almost stops running before quickly getting himself together. He’d probably kicked up a rock. 

He picks up his pace as the suspect disappears into a thick patch of trees, flat out sprinting now. Rask’s racing close along behind him, and he hears her curse over the wind rushing in his ears. 

“No signal!” she shouts to him. “No backup!” 

“Okay!” he yells back, pushing himself even further. They can get the suspect, just the two of them. He’s certain of that.

And certainly they  _ would  _ have been able to get their suspect, but Kurt suddenly trips over a log and hits the ground hard, and then Rask tries to sidestep him but stumbles too, and by the time they both get back to their feet, the suspect is nowhere to be found. Kurt’s about to set off running again, desperate now to catch them, when Rask’s hand grabs his arm firmly, preventing him from moving. 

“You’re bleeding,” she says, and he doesn’t even bother to look. 

“I fell,” he says. He’d be more shocked if he  _ wasn’t  _ bleeding somewhere, honestly. 

“No, Kurt. You’re _ bleeding.” _ She gestures to his stomach, and he looks down. 

His entire stomach is covered in blood and smeared with dirt from where he’d fallen. If he looks closely, he can discern a hole in his shirt, and if he looks even more closely, he can see the hole extending into himself. 

He’s been shot. 

The second he realizes that, Kurt feels his legs give out from under him, and suddenly he’s sinking to the ground, saved from flat-out collapsing by Rask’s arms around him, guiding him down to sit on the ground. 

He hadn’t felt it before. He’d been running before, distracted, moving. But now that his attention’s been drawn to it, now that he’s seen it, now that he’s  _ not  _ moving, has nothing on his mind but  _ it, _ it hurts. He presses a hand to it out of instinct, feeling warm blood coat his fingers, barely registering the feeling of the pressure amongst everything else. There’s  _ so much blood.  _

Rask takes off her jacket, crouching in front of him. She balls it up and then takes his hand, pulling it away from his stomach. At first he doesn’t understand, tries to pull away and keep protecting himself, but eventually she gets his hand out of the way and presses the jacket into his stomach. 

Whether it’s the unexpected change or the fact that it’s not _him_ who’s in control of it, something about the feeling of the jacket being pressed to him makes the wound scream in a way it hadn’t with his own hand covering it. He bites down hard on his bottom lip to stop himself from screaming, tears welling in his eyes. He looks down at the jacket, held firmly in Rask’s bloody hand, and wonders whether he’s dying. 

Rask’s other hand is occupied with her phone, and then it isn’t. She tosses it to the ground with an angry noise that makes Kurt very worried.

“Still no service,” she mutters, more to herself than to him. “We’re going to have to get ourselves out of here.”

Even in his current slightly-out-of-it condition, Kurt recognizes that this seems like a bad idea. Right now, for as much pain as he’s in, for as much blood as is coming out of him, it’s better than it will be if he’s moving. 

Rask, though, apparently knows this as well, because she makes no move to get up. Instead, with her free hand, she pushes Kurt down to the ground until he’s lying flat on his back. She grabs his legs and stretches them out in front of him, lifting them up to place a small log underneath his back. 

He knows this is in an attempt to elevate the gunshot wound above his heart and hopefully make him lose less blood, but it’s horribly uncomfortable and puts a weird kind of pressure on the wound. It does seem to slow the bleeding marginally, though, so he doesn’t ask her to get rid of it. 

“You’re not walking out of here,” Rask says, which Kurt thinks is rather obvious. “And I don’t think we could make it all the way out of here before you’d have lost too much blood.” 

_ And probably died, _ Kurt fills in in his head. He doesn’t want to die. 

“I don’t want to die.”

“You’re not going to die,” she tells him, and presses down harder on the jacket. 

“Are you sure?” he asks, because right now dying seems like the most logical outcome of this. 

“You’re not bleeding massively, so the bullet probably didn’t hit an artery, and anyway, I have an idea.”

“What?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“If it stops me from dying, then  _ yes, _ I will,” Kurt insists. He’d get shot again, right now, he thinks, if it meant he wouldn’t die. 

“Okay, but fair warning, it’s going to hurt.”

“More than getting shot?” he asks, half joking. 

“Possibly.”

That definitely does not inspire confidence. Kurt feels his hands start to shake where they’re balled into fists at his sides, anticipating the pain already. 

Rask grabs one of his shaking hands and uncurls it, then presses it firmly atop her own on the jacket. He wonders why she’s done that for a second, and then she lets go of the jacket altogether. It slips from his grasp for just a second, and then he’s pressing it back down, weirdly grateful to be in control of its pressure again. 

Rask stands up, and for a horrible second Kurt wonders if she’s going to leave, but she just sticks her hands into her pants pockets and pulls out a rather large pocketknife and a box of matches. 

He has a terrible feeling that he knows where this is going, and he instinctively shuts his eyes against it, though nothing has happened yet. It will, though, he knows. It  _ has  _ to, if he wants to not bleed out in the middle of the woods. 

“I assume you know what I’m going to do?” Rask asks him, kneeling down next to him. He nods and takes a shaky breath. 

“Good. Just hold on.”

He resolutely keeps his eyes shut as he hears her strike a match, hears a flame  _ whoosh, _ feels the heat of a small fire. He shivers, feeling his heart pound, inevitably forcing yet more blood out of him.  _ He just wants this to be over… _

There’s a rustling sound, as of someone taking off their shirt, and then a tearing of fabric. 

“This is probably not going to taste very pleasant, but it’ll at least give you something to bite down on,” Rask says, and Kurt knows exactly what she’s doing, knows it’s almost time for this to happen. He opens his mouth and bites down on the rolled-up shirt, imagining Rask running the blade of the knife through the flames until it glows red-hot…

She grabs ahold of his hand and gently lifts it away from his stomach, the jacket still in his fist. He feels the wound leak more blood at its removal and wishes he could put it back. There’s no chance of that happening, though. 

Rask then lifts the hem of his t-shirt, and he feels it pull away from his skin very slowly, tacky with blood. A scrap of fabric - what he’d heard tearing, Kurt thinks - passes over the wound, though he can’t imagine it does much given how much blood he knows there is. It feels incredibly uncomfortable against his skin, but he tries to focus on that feeling, preparing for it to get much worse. 

His hands are both back on the ground now, again balled up into shaking fists. He feels Rask grab one, gently uncurl the fingers, and hold on tight.

“Three, two -”

On  _ two, _ there’s a searing hot pain on his stomach, and he screams into the cloth, body writhing instinctively to try and escape the pain. He feels the edge of the knife press into him again and again, and screams until his throat is too scratchy to make any real noise at all. He wants to pass out, wants desperately for this to stop, but it doesn’t. The pain goes on and on and on, burning into him. 

The pain never  _ stops, _ but eventually it dies down enough that Kurt begins to become aware of other things. His throat hurts. His face is tacky with teats. His right palm burns from cuts made by his nails pressing into it. His left hand is still holding onto Rask’s, just as tightly, and he lets go abruptly. Very slowly, he opens his eyes. 

“It’s over,” Rask tells him. “The worst part is over now.”

He’s too exhausted to nod, and the cloth in his mouth prevents any verbal agreement (not that the scratchiness in his throat would have made that easy, anyway), so he just kind of shudders out a breath in response, and again squeezes his eyes shut. 

She pulls the cloth out of his mouth, and must tear it further, because after a second she wraps a strip of fabric around his stomach and ties it. He feels it press uncomfortably into his freshly-cauterized wound, but he barely reacts to the pain. 

He hears the pocketknife close with a snap, hears Rask smother the fire with something, and wonders what’s going to happen now. He doesn’t think he can stand, let alone walk.

Not that he needs to do any of those things. Rask picks him up, incredibly gently so that it barely hurts at all. She holds onto him tightly, one arm behind his shoulders and the other under his knees, and begins walking. Kurt shivers involuntarily in her arms as a breeze kicks up, sending cold air rushing over his body. 

“I’d give you my jacket if it weren’t already soaked in blood. Or my shirt, if it weren’t torn up into three pieces.”

“Sorry,” Kurt mumbles, voice scratchy and painful and quiet. He shivers again and presses himself closer to her.

“What are you sorry for?  _ You’re _ the one who’s cold,” Rask points out.  _ “I’m _ sorry I didn’t wear more layers today. All I’ve got left to offer is a t-shirt, which is exactly what you’ve got.”

“Yours...is less bloody,” Kurt says, his voice now so quiet he wonders whether he’s actually spoken aloud. Her shirt must be less bloody than his, he figures.  _ His  _ is absolutely soaked in blood, drying rapidly now in the cool air, sticking to his skin.

“It still is bloody,” Rask promises.  _ “You’re _ bloody, and I’m carrying you.”

He nods slightly, lacking the energy and physical ability to speak any further.

Rask sighs. “You’ll just have to get me a new one when you get out of the hospital.”

Kurt supposes he’d spend all the money he’s got to buy her some new non-blood-soaked shirts. It’s the least he can do in thanks for her saving his life. Which she’s  _ done, _ he realizes, as he sees flashing lights through his closed eyelids. 

“Wh-”

_ “There _ you are,” Kurt hears someone say, followed closely by,  _ “shit. _ Medics!” 

He keeps his eyes firmly closed as he feels himself be laid down onto the familiar material of a stretcher, feels himself move, hears doors slam and a siren start. 

“You’ll be okay,” he hears Rask say from somewhere next to him, her voice leaving no room for him to doubt the truth of her statement. 

_ He’s going to be okay. _ That reassurance is enough for his body to finally stop fighting against the pain. He passes out before they even give him any drugs, knowing that he’ll wake up alive.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!!!! hope you enjoyed, please tell me if you did <3


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